the business world (both Doriot and La Rocque received funds from the steel trust), and that—with the exception of Doriot's PPF before 1937—none of these movements had any significant working class support (while Doriot's shrank after he turned rightward in 1937). Too many historians, Soucy argues, have taken the "socialist" rhetoric—or Orwellian "double-talk"—of some of these movements at face value, ignoring how it was repeatedly contradicted by their specific positions on social, economic and political issues. For Soucy, these organizations were far more nationalist than socialist, as was also one of their precursors, the Cercle Proudhon, which honored not the early "property is theft" Pierre-Joseph Proudhon but the later much more socially conservative Proudhon. Although Soucy points out the obvious—that not all French conservatives in the 1920s and 30's were attracted to fascism (especially members of the Alliance démocratique and the Parti démocratique populaire in the 1930s)—he regards the most successful French fascisms of the era, that is, those with the largest party memberships, as "variants" or "extensions" of social conservatism in crisis, movements that benefited from the right-wing backlash to the elections of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924 and the Popular Front in 1936. He contends that one of these variants was La Rocque's CF/PSF, a movement that had close to a million party members by 1937. Soucy describes a number of characteristics that the CF/PSF shared with other European fascisms of the era and elaborates a similarly multi-faceted definition of fascism itself. Whereas some historians who consider upper class conservatives who supported fascism as "allies" or "accomplices" of fascism but not fascists themselves, Soucy objects that such "selective essentialism" spares traditional elites, but not those beneath them, from being regarded as fascists. For Soucy, the differences between non-fascist authoritarian conservatives and fascist authoritarian conservatives were often more a matter of degree (which could increase when threatened by leftists) than of fixed or irreconcilable essences. Compared to non-fascist authoritarian conservatives, fascists had a greater hatred of "decadence", a greater desire to create large numbers of anti-decadent "new men", a greater appeal to the young (paramilitary "virility" was the ideal), and were more fiercely nationalistic. They also indulged in a more virulent demonology than many conservatives, blaming more harshly or "extremely" Communists, Socialists, freemasons, internationalists and (though not always) Jews for most of the nation's ills. Fascists had a greater taste for repressing "unpatriotic" souls. They were more willing